Washington Journal; In a Public City, a Monument to Private Struggles

The nation's capital is not exactly a spiritual city, but it has its spiritual corners. It even has a small but valuable history of people close to power struggling with spiritual questions. One of them was Henry Adams, whose extraordinary monument lies off one of the least beaten paths in Washington.

In life, Adams struggled with questions of balance: What is the spiritual cost of living an urbane social existence? Can one live in the shadow of the White House and disdain politics?

In death, he continues to pose an eternal question through a mysterious bronze statue offered as a tonic of silence and stillness to this city's symphonies of hypocrisy, fugues of corruption and operas of bombast.

Adams, a polished historian, Harvard professor and author of two of the most perceptive books ever written about Washington, ''The Education of Henry Adams'' and ''Democracy,'' commissioned the statue from his friend the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens as a memorial to his wife after she took her own life in 1885.

The figure sits shrouded, its strong, placid face hooded in shadow, its eyes closed, its right arm raised in a gesture neither beckoning nor forbidding. Sitting on a rock hidden behind a copse of holly trees in Rock Creek Cemetery in the northernmost part of the capital, the figure could be the younger, shyer, more contemplative sister of the Statue of Liberty.

There is no inscription to show that this is the grave of Adams and his wife of 13 years, Marian.

A photographer known by her nickname, Clover, Mrs. Adams committed suicide at the age of 42 by drinking potassium cyanide, a chemical she used in her photography, at a time when she was depressed over her father's death.

Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, had always tried to keep an ironic distance in his writing. The salon at their house on Lafayette Square was the witty and dazzling center of Washington social life. But he was a remote and difficult man, and after his wife's death, the 47-year-old Adams wrapped himself in silence, never again speaking her name. But for the next 33 years, he kept the fatal vial of potassium cyanide in his desk drawer.

Coming from self-important Boston, living in pompous Washington, Adams disdained the displays of ego he saw in the two cities. He wanted his statue to have an Eastern abnegation of self. He wanted it to be a guide to the serene infinite, away from ''the violence of nature.'' With the sense of the insignificance of man, he said he had wanted the figure ''to express my notion that the most dignified thing for a worm to do was to sit up and sit still.''

He instructed Saint-Gaudens that the statue should express the ''acceptance of the inevitable.'' The architect Stanford White designed a curving pink marble bench and pebbled floor for the sanctuary circling the statue.

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Many people consider the memorial, completed in 1891, to be Saint-Gaudens's masterpiece. The author and critic Alexander Woollcott called it ''the most beautiful thing ever fashioned by the hand of man on this continent,'' and John Hay, the Secretary of State who was a close friend of the Adamses, said it reflected ''a past without beginning and a future without end.''

In a letter in 1896, Adams wrote: ''The whole meaning and feeling of the figure is in its universality and anonymity. My own name for it is 'The Peace of God.' ''

Naming the statue became the highbrow Washington parlor game of the 1890's. After Mark Twain said it embodied all human grief, people began to call the statue ''Grief.''

But this annoyed Adams, who wrote to the sculptor's son in 1908, ''Your father meant it to ask a question, not to give an answer, and the man who answers it will be damned to eternity, like the man who answered the Sphinx.''

Adams did not mention his wife in his autobiography. But he did write about the statue, explaining, ''The interest of the figure was not its meaning but in the response of the observer.''

Washington is undergoing an Adams renaissance at the moment. The National Portrait Gallery is featuring the first retrospective of Clover Adams's photographs, which Adams did not allow to be published while he lived. In addition, a new book, ''The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends,'' by Patricia O'Toole, has been published by Clarkson Potter Inc., and a new paperback edition of ''The Education of Henry Adams,'' about the perplexity of being ''an unworldly, worldly man,'' is being issued this fall by Library of America.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who wrote the introduction for the new edition of Adams's autobiography, discovered the Adams statue five years ago.

''It's the only place in Washington I know where one can collect oneself without being reminded of public purposes,'' Mr. Wieseltier said one summer afternoon as he sat at the memorial, which he visits every few weeks. ''It is lovelier than the Jefferson Memorial and as obsessed with secrecy as the F.B.I. building.''

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A version of this article appears in print on July 29, 1990, on Page 1001018 of the National edition with the headline: Washington Journal; In a Public City, a Monument to Private Struggles. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe